Complicit

I have been working on this series since the turn of the year. They are, perhaps, the most political works I have ever made. I have always tried to lead an ethically decent life: I’ve campaigned on ecological issues, been on marches, try to buy locally, gardened organically and yet I rarely openly touch on these issues in my work. In my collages and Tidelines work I have certainly hinted at my anger and despair at the way we dump things in the oceans and my titles for pictures give the game away, but this is the first time I have started to explore my conflicted feelings about our consumerism and it’s intertwining with a capitalist system which is clearly breaking society and our environment. At last, everyone seems to be talking about the scourge of plastics, a dream gone wrong, and what we can do to cut down on our use of it before it totally chokes life here on the planet. This has encouraged me to deeply look again at what I can do to use less of the things that damage our world and I find that it is almost impossible to be free of complicity.

So I am starting from the standpoint of a favourite quote from Beth Orton and am trying to “…learn the trick to turn|What’s not so pretty|Into something more beautiful”. I will be writing more about the series and the story behind these monoprints, but it needs a clearer mind before I do.

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#BlackSquares365

“004”Ink on Stonehenge paper 20cm x 20cm

My current one-every-day-for-a-year project is to create a fresh artwork from scratch each day around the idea of Black Squares. I’m calling it “distributed art”: lots of people can own an individual, unique piece of art and at the same time hold a share of one larger artwork spread across time and space; no one person will own it all, nobody will ever see it in its entirety!

#Letter365

The culmination of my year-long project #Letter365 was an installation at Bridport Arts Centre. #Letter365 was an unfolding artwork created a piece each day for a year. Each day's artwork was sealed in an envelope and sent to the Arts Centre where they were held unopened until the installation.. People were able to invest in the project by buying a day - unseen. Only sold pieces were opened. I documented the progress of the project on the #Letter365 blog